A Busy Day

So as promised, I went to Nottingham today to check out what's in our shops this season (S/S). I was pleased to find a lot of the new trends I'm into at the moment are big on the high-street!

My task was to basically pick a store to represent each sector of shop – lower, middle and higher end store. I then had to pick four garments which fitted into a trend I've researched and all four garments had to be the same style in each of the three stores. If that makes sense. So basically I chose to look at an a-symmetrical (one shoulder) dress, a double-breasted jacket, high waist trousers and a blouse from three stores which were H&M (being my lower store), River Island (middle) and Vivienne Westwood (high). I decided to look at womenswear because this research is leading to a design project and I find womenswear much easier and more fun to do.

Obviously The higher end clothes were much much better quality, and much much more expensive. For example, a one-shoulder black dress from H&M was £14.99, whereas the Vivienne Westwood dress was £275! I felt like I was touching gold! Believe me, if I had the money I would choose the Vivienne Westwood dress but as I am not even close to being able to buy things like that H&M is always within my price range.

The main trends I spotted in a few shops were block colours, animal print (I couldn't resist buying an over-sized leopard print vest top from TopShop), pretty florals and skin tones. Everywhere seemed to be fitting the trends really well, but still in keeping with their own image. It seemed that a lot of the styles hadn't changed from TopShop, but they had updated their ranges to suit current trends, which is fine by me!

River Island really surprised me with the amount of bright colours in the clothes. A t-shirt my friend Ben pointed out looked like a t-shirt used by art students experimenting with fluorescent paints. The a-symmetric dress I picked from River Island was the brightest yellow I'd ever seen, and there were bright pink bags and dresses all over the place.

It seems that colour is the over-riding factor in this seasons fashion. Bold colours seem to be getting bolder and prints crazier.

I had a good afternoon altogether, it's really interesting seeing pictures of designer-wear in magazines which have then been filtered through to much cheaper clothes on rails for us all to buy.